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Ron Jacobs
The
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August 21, 2003
Robert Fisk
The US
Needs to Blame Anyone But Locals for UN Bombing
Virginia Tilley
The Quisling Policies of the UN in Iraq: Toward a Permanent War?
Rep. Henry Waxman
Bush Owes the Public Some Serious Answers on Iraq
Ben Terrall
War Crimes and Punishment in Indonesia: Rapes, Murders and Slaps
on the Wrists
Elaine Cassel
Brother John Ashcroft's Traveling Patriot Salvation Show
Christopher Brauchli
Getting Gouged by Banks
Marjorie Cohn
Sergio Vieira de Mello: Victim of Terrorism or US Policy in Iraq?
Vicente Navarro
Media
Double Standards: The Case of Mr. Aznar, Friend of Bush
Website of the Day
The Intelligence Squad
August 20, 2003
Robert Fisk
Now No
One Is Safe in Iraq
Caoimhe Butterly
Life and Death on the Frontlines of Baghdad
Kurt Nimmo
UN Bombing: Act of Terrorism or Guerrilla War?
Michael Egan
Revisiting the Paranoid Style in the Dark
Ramzi Kysia
Peace
is not an Abstract Idea
Steven Higgs
NPR and the NAFTA Highway
John L. Hess
A Downside Day
Edward Said
The Imperial Bluster of Tom Delay
Jason Leopold
Gridlock at Path 15: the California Blackouts were the "Wake
Up Call"
Website of the Day
Ashcroft's Patriotic Hype
August 19, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Blackouts Happen
Gary Leupp
"Our Patch": Australia v. the Evil Doers of the South
Pacific
Sean Donahue
Uribe's Cruel Model: Colombia Moves Toward Totalitarianism
Matt Martin
Bush's Credibility Problem on Missile Defense
Juliana Fredman
Recipe for the Destruction of a Hudna
John Ross
Fox Government's Attack on Mexican Basques
Sasan Fayazmanesh
What Kermit Roosevelt Didn't Say
Website of the Day
Tom Delay's Dual Loyalities
August 18, 2003
Uri Avnery
Hero in War and Peace
Stan Goff
The Volunteer Military and the Wicked Adventure
Cathy Breen
Baghdad on the Hudson
Michael Kimaid
Fight the Power (Companies)!
Jason Leopold
The California Rip-Off Revisited: Arnold, Milken and Ken Lay
Matt Siegfried
The Bush Administration in Context
Elaine Cassel
At Last, A Judge Who Acts Like a Judge
Alexander Cockburn
Judy Miller's War
Harvey Wasserman
The Legacy of Blackout Pete Wilson
Website of the Day
Fire Griles!
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher Gilad Atzmon! BBC Names EXILE Top Jazz CD
August 16 / 17, 2003
Flavia Alaya
Bastille
New Jersey
Jeffrey St. Clair
War Pimps
Saul Landau
The Legacy of Moncada: the Cuban Revolution at 50
Brian Cloughley
What Has Happened to the US Army in Iraq?
William S. Lind
Coffins for the Crews: How Not to Use Light Armored Vehicles
Col. Dan Smith
Time for Straight Talk
Wenonah Hauter
Which
Electric System Do We Want?
David Lindorff
Where's Arnold When We Need Him?
Harvey Wasserman
This Grid Should Not Exist
Don Moniak
"Unusual Events" at Nuclear Power Plants: a Timeline
for August 14, 2003
David Vest
Rolling Blackout Revue
Merlin Chowkwanyun
An Interview with Sherman Austin
Adam Engel
The Loneliest Number
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Hamod & Albert
Book of the Weekend
Powerplay by Sharon Beder
August 14, 2003
Peter Phillips
Inside
Bohemian Grove: Where US Power Elites Party
Brian Cloughley
Charlie Wilson and Pakistan: the Strange Congressman Behind the
CIA's Most Expensive War
Linville and Ruder
Tyson
Strike Draws the Line
Jim Lobe
Bush Administration Divided Over Iran
Ramzy Baroud
Sharon Freezes the Road Map
Tom Turnipseed
Blowback in Iraq
Gary Leupp
Condi's
Speech: From Birgmingham to Baghdad, Imperialism's Freedom Ride
Website of the Day
Tony Benn's Greatest Hits
August 13, 2003
Joanne Mariner
A Wall of Separation Through the
Heart
Donald Worster
The Heavy Cost of Empire
Standard Schaefer
Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Elaine Cassel
Murderous Errors: Executing the Innocent
Ralph Nader
Make the Recall Count
Alexander Cockburn
Ted Honderich Hit with "Anti-Semitism" Slur
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Ron Jacobs
Revisionist History: the Bush Administration, Civil Rights and
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Josh Frank
Dean's Constitutional Hang-Up
Wayne Madsen
What's a Fifth Columnist? Well, Someone Like Hitchens
Ray McGovern
Relax,
It Was All a Pack of Lies
Wendy Brinker
Hubris in the White House
Website of the Day
Black
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J.B.
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Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
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Myth
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Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
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Gore Vidal
The
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Francis Boyle
Impeach
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August
23, 2003
Forest or Against
Us
The
Bush Doctor Calls on Oregon
By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
How Many Rivers Do We Have To
Cross,
Before We Can Talk To The Boss? Eh!
All That We Got, It Seems We Have Lost;
We Must Have Really Paid The Cost.
Burnin' And A-lootin' Tonight;
Burnin' And A-lootin' Tonight.
Burnin' and a-Lootin'
by Bob Marley
George Bush descended on Oregon this week to fleece
a million bucks from a band of local fat cats in Portland and
shill for his new logging plan for the national forests...or
in the slurpy Bush lexicon "for-ur-ests."
Outside the Chiles Center at the University
of Portland, more than 5,000 protesters massed in a nearby park,
clashing with police and taunting Bush with bullhorns and placards.
A sample: "My Apache Helicopter, Killed Your Iraqi Honor
Student;" "W. Lies: Impeach the Lying Mother-Hugger."
"He Lied; They Died." One woman whirled down Lombard
Street with her body adorned only by a finger-painted message
proclaiming: "The Only Bush I Trust is My Own."
Inside the domed center, the Bush faithful
supped on Columbia River salmon, huckleberry tarts and Oregon
wine, at $2,000 a plate. Bush spoke for less than 20 minutes.
No one complained about the brevity of his oration.
Lifting his metaphors from Gen. Westmoreland,
the president explained to his handpicked audience of timber
executives and Christian fundamentalists that he must log off
the public's forests in order to save them from their own incendiary
instincts. It's all about the health of the forest, averred the
president.
According to the Bush doctor, the forests
of the West are burning because they are sick, infected with
a growing cancer of,
yes, trees. The offending trees--the suicidal bombers of the
national forests--must be extracted with haste using the delicate
surgical bite of a chainsaw. All in the name of compassionate
ecology.
If big timber makes a few hundred million
bucks out of the operation, so what? The taxpayers love their
forests and will be only too happy to foot the bill. You can't
say this administration isn't willing to shell out money for
the environment.
Of course, nothing scares people quite
like images of raging fires. Freud, Jung and Karl Rove don't
agree on much, but they see eye-to-eye on the primal fear of
fire and its potential uses to the political power structure.
(See: Moses and Monotheism.) And Bush is manipulating the searing
images of summer fires across the West--an annual ecological
ritual dating back to the end of the ice ages--to bully through
Congress his plan to open the national forests to unrestrained
looting by his loyal allies in the timber industry, a sector
which has been battered senseless by Bush's recession.
On this hot August night, Bush had providence
(or something like it) on his side. A few days prior to his visit,
two fires erupted in the very area of the Deschutes National
Forest, near Bend, Oregon, where Bush was set to make his pronouncements
about how clearcutting ancient forests down a field of raw stumps
serves as a kind of preventive medicine when it comes to forests
fires.
Bush was supposed to deliver his sermon
on the trees of mass destruction at Camp Sherman, a toney mountain
resort studded with million dollar cabins absurdly erected in
the heart of a fire prone forest. But the two fires converged
and saturated the compound in what one resident described as
"a snowstorm of smoke." The Bush carnival relocated
to the fairgrounds in Redmond, a desert town 30 miles to the
east.
The origin of those fires remains a mystery,
largely because no one is looking very hard for the ignition
points. Bush labeled them "wild" fires, but they were
almost certainly arsons. There were no lightning strikes in that
part of the forest the day fires started. A closure order had
been issued in advance of the president's visit. Who could have
set them? For nearly a week that area on the eastern flank of
Mt. Jefferson was closed to public entry for security reasons.
Only Forest Service personnel and the Secret Service were permitted
entry.
Most big fires are deliberately set,
either by pyromaniacs (often working for the Forest Service)
or by timber companies looking for a way to win access to cheap
timber unencumbered by environmental considerations. One recent
study from California estimated that two out of every three major
fires was caused by arson. In the eastern United States, 99 percent
of all forest fires are intentionally set by people. To paraphrase
Charleton Heston: Trees don't kill, Mr. President, people do.
In America these days, if you ignite
a forest, your company gets rewarded with millions in free timber
and a photo-op with the commander-in-chief. If you torch an SUV,
you're labeled a terrorist and get sent to the federal slammer
for 10 years.
Regardless of the genesis of the fires,
Bush got the backdrop his handlers craved. As he fumbled his
way through his speech, Bush pointed ominously to the west at
the towering plumes of smoke and leaping tongues of fire, as
if they were the flaming ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah-the wages
of pagan environmentalism.
"It's a holocaust," cried Bush.
"It's devastating. We saw the flames jump from treetop to
treetop."
To the uninitiated, the smoldering scene
may have looked like Shock and Awe had just hit the forests of
central Oregon. But in fact these fires were nothing out of the
ordinary. Oregon's forests, especially those on the dry, eastern
slopes of the Cascade Mountains, evolved with fire. In fact,
they are fire dependent forests, which need fire as much as they
need water and soil. The ecological problems started when the
Forest Service, largely at the behest of the timber industry,
began suppressing forest fires around the turn of the century.
This allowed brushy debris to accumulate on the forest floor,
material that was normally cleansed out by frequent, low intensity
wildfires. The agency exacerbated matters by logging off most
of the big, fire-resistant trees. The old giants of the forests
were replaced by scrubby trees and brush, attractive to insects
and easily flammable. It's an explosive mix that has turned normal
fires into ferocious infernos.
The new Bush plan is the old light-and-log
it approach dressed up in the dainty language of Clinton time.
Bush calls his plan the Healthy Forest Initiative. Motto: No
tree shall be left behind.
But it doesn't have much to do with health
or forests. It's a logging plan, pure and simple. Bush talks
about "thinning" the forest, as if he was proposing
a kind of summer pruning operation. In fact, the Bush plan, which
covers never 20 million acres of federal land, places no limits
on the size of trees that can be logged. This means the timber
industry will get to haul off giant Ponderosa pines and Douglas-firs
that are hundreds of years old and provide habitat to some of
the rarest wildlife species in the American west, including spotted
owls and salmon. This sets up an inevitable collision between
the Bush logging plan and environmental laws, such as the Endangered
Species Act. Not to worry. The Bush plan also includes a provision
that exempts it from compliance with these laws and largely shields
it from appeals and lawsuits.
There's not much in the Bush plan that
will help reduce fire risks to communities near forests. The
proposal is aimed exclusively at logging federal lands while
numerous studies show that 85 percent of the land that surrounds
communities most at risk from wildfires is private lands. Indeed
it's much more likely that logging will increase the fire risk.
Many more fires start in logged over areas than in old-growth
forests. There's an easy explanation for this: clearcuts are
on the average 20 percent hotter and drier than adjacent stands
of mature forest. In addition, most forest fires started by humans
occur near logging roads-the arsonists want fast access in and
out.
That the Bush plan pleased the timber
industry should surprise no one. After all, it was largely concocted
last summer by Mark Rey, Undersecretary of Agriculture overseeing
the Forest Service. For more than a decade, Rey served as the
top lobbyist for the timber industry's chief trade association,
the National Forest Products Association. Rey received help from
Mark Rutzick, a longtime timber-industry lawyer who in April
was named senior adviser in the office of the general counsel
of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which
oversees salmon issues in the Pacific Northwest. You've heard
of embedded reporters? Well, these are embedded lobbyists.
Even with all this going for it, the
Bush plan remains stymied. The House of Representatives approved
the Healthy Forests Act this spring. But it is stalled, perhaps
fatally, in the Senate.
Much of the credit can go to the environmental
movement, which shows signs of beginning to recover its spine,
if not its institutional memory. After eight years of rationalizing
repeated Clintonian incursions against environmental laws, ranging
from the gutting the endangered species act to rending national
forest policy, the mainstream greens seem reinvigorated and have
largely fought Bush to a standstill.
The greens have rightly erected barricades
in Bush's path, but in doing so risk descending into a kind of
terminal hypocrisy. In joint press releases issued during Bush's
visit to Portland, the mainstream greens castigated Bush for
trying to unravel decades of environmental laws and more recent
rules enacted by Clinton, who they lauded as the greatest environmental
president since Teddy Roosevelt. In fact, Bush merely wants to
drive his logging trucks through the door that Clinton opened.
But the environmentalists should be wary.
The fate of the western forests now depend almost entirely on
the calculations of a few Democrats in the senate. But only a
few short years ago, many of these very same senators traded
their votes away and approved Clinton's Salvage Logging Rider,
a bill every bit as venal and destructive as the one now put
forward by Bush. At the time, the DC enviro lobby largely bit
their tongues. Now they are almost hyperventilating with their
screams against Bush's environmental villainy. The greens rewrite
such history at their own peril.
In the end, big forest fires are simply
part of the ecological landscape of the West. They've always
been associated with these forests and always will be. But politicians
will never talk honestly about fire. Instead, they exploit our
primal fear of flames to shovel billions into the pockets of
their political patrons. Each year Congress wastes nearly $3
billion in fighting forest fires. All to no avail. The blazes
rarely go out before the rains of autumn.
There is one factor that does seem to
play a key role in determining the intensity of forest fires:
climate. Forest economist Randal O'Toole, director of the Thoreau
Institute, examined rainfall data and acres burned by forest
fires in the western states dating back to the 1920s. He found
an exacting correlation between drought and forest fires.
"Numerous commentators have blamed
the number of acres burned in recent years on increased fuels
from past fire suppression, increased fuels from timber cutting,
and environmentalist obstructions to fuel treatments," says
O'Toole. "But a close look at the data reveal that the main
factor responsible for fires today is drought. When examined
on a decade-by-decade basis, drought is responsible for 98 percent
of the variation in acres burned in each decade from the 1950s
through the 1990s. Looking at individual years, 2002, 2000, and
1988 were the droughtiest years since 1960, and the three years
when the most acres burned."
Those are hard facts. Still, I doubt
that Bush will be declaring a holy war on global warming anytime
soon.
Jeffrey St. Clair is author of Been
Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature
(Common Courage Press) and coeditor, with Alexander Cockburn,
of The
Politics of Anti-Semitism (AK Press). Both books will
be published in October.
Weekend
Edition Features for August 16 / 17, 2003
Flavia Alaya
Bastille
New Jersey
Jeffrey St. Clair
War Pimps
Saul Landau
The Legacy of Moncada: the Cuban Revolution at 50
Brian Cloughley
What Has Happened to the US Army in Iraq?
William S. Lind
Coffins for the Crews: How Not to Use Light Armored Vehicles
Col. Dan Smith
Time for Straight Talk
Wenonah Hauter
Which
Electric System Do We Want?
David Lindorff
Where's Arnold When We Need Him?
Harvey Wasserman
This Grid Should Not Exist
Don Moniak
"Unusual Events" at Nuclear Power Plants: a Timeline
for August 14, 2003
David Vest
Rolling Blackout Revue
Merlin Chowkwanyun
An Interview with Sherman Austin
Adam Engel
The Loneliest Number
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Hamod & Albert
Book of the Weekend
Powerplay by Sharon Beder
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